


You'll Probably Go to Heaven

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Japanese Folklore, M/M, Supernatural Creatures AU, characters + ships will be updated as they appear, kageyama is confused about everything and no one will explain anything, very Kageyama-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 09:44:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4559925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is a crime (but not really), a death (but not really), and invisible worlds just like ours (but not really).</p>
            </blockquote>





	You'll Probably Go to Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> a giant au where no one is human, everyone is a monster, and Kageyama Tobio just wants to get back into his body. the plot won't start till next chapter because this is just an intro?? yea that sounds about right. The plot'll get thicker and this is about as light as it gets lmao.  
> i don't have a beta for this and i did my best to proof it  
> DISCLAIMER: i got all my info from wikipedia if something is wrong CORRECT ME PLEASE i'll fix it

It starts, as most things do, with a death.

Except, it’s not really a death. But to Tobio, it may as well be. It’s cold and dark, and he feels a terrible sense of isolation to the very marrow of his bones. It creeps into him, piercing his skin like thorny roots digging their way into the soil of his body, spreading themselves through his veins and infecting him with that awful loneliness. It’s not like he’s unused to the feeling of being alone—quite the opposite. Tobio finds comfort in solitude, where he can control everything that is happening and make sure it’s perfect, where there’s no room for human error except his own.

Tobio doesn’t have that here. Here, there is only blackness, suffocating and inky. Here, he feels alone in a way he has never felt before. _This is what it must be like to be the last man on earth,_ he thinks.

_This is what the afterlife must be,_ the chilling thought makes his stomach churn as he turns hishead sluggishly around in an attempt to see something that might lead to a way out. There is nothing but thick darkness, choking him and clouding his mind. Panic wells up inside him, rising like bile in his throat.

“ _O-o-o-oh_!”

The voice slices through the air like a knife through warm butter, rippling liquidly around Tobio. It’s coming from everywhere at once, as if there are speakers hidden in the perpetual shadows, projecting that high, laughing voice all around him. Tobio does his best to move and see the source of the statement, but it’s like swimming in syrup. His limbs betray him and weigh down on his body like cement, rooting him in place.

“What’s _thi-i-is_?” the voice asks, right next to Tobio’s ear. Tobio would have jolted away, maybe swung out in surprise, if he had more mobility in this eerie vacuum. But alas, the only thing he can manage to do is open his mouth slightly, soundless. The voice laughs, high and crystal clear. The soft flutter of whiskers just barely brushes against his arm, turning his skin to gooseflesh. The sense of being alone is gone, but he almost wishes it were back, if only to get rid of the unbearable feeling of being watched that replaces it. Tobio feels like a bug under a microscope, being scrutinized and observed. Anger and discomfort well up inside of him like a boiling pot of water, and he itches to move, to get out of wherever he is.

“Am I dead?” the question is on his lips before he knows it, the words slipping unwillingly from him. It sounds muffled, like he’s speaking into a pillow—not at all like the clearness that the other speaker displayed. The disembodied voice laughs hollowly, breath hot on the shell of Tobio’s ear.

“Not yet, no. Soon, probably. Oh, I haven’t seen an ikiryou in _ages_!” the voice sounds cheerful and excited, but a trill of fear runs down Tobio’s spine regardless. Swallowing thickly, he growls out a reply, trying to sound less terrified than he is.

“A _what_?” he asks, but then the presence is gone, leaving behind just the echo of that trilling laugh. He can’t tell if it’s malicious or jovial, but one fact remains clear: Tobio is painfully alone again.

And then he’s falling.

There’s a tug at his back, as if there’s an invisible cord tied to his heart and strung through his back, yanking him through the darkness. There’s resistance, like he’s pressing hard and quick on one of those mixtures of corn starch and water that he had made in science class in elementary school. It pulls at his hair and clothes and fills up his mouth and nostrils, until he can’t breathe and he’s sure that if he wasn’t dead before, he’s going to be by the time this is done—

Sharp daggers of light stab at Tobio’s eyes, and he instinctively slams them shut to block out the piercing brightness. Now that the suffocation of the darkness is gone, everything is so oppressively loud and light. The sounds of a chattered conversation drift along cold, sterile air to his ears. Mechanical beeps and blips sound constantly, and a staticky voice over a PA system calls out every once in a while. After a few seconds, Tobio blinks open his eyes, still squinting at the sudden whiteness and sterility around him. It’s a… a hospital? He’s in a hospital? Why is he—

The memories Tobio him like a tidal wave, hard and fast and knocking him off his metaphorical feet. A crash, a scream that he’s not sure belongs to him, and _pain_. Everywhere, fiery and hot and blistering. His face, his torso, his arms, his legs, it all burns. He knows it’s just a memory, that he’s not _actually_ in pain, but it’s so vivid that he may as well be. He falls to his knees, hard, on the tile, and a very real pain rockets through them.

“Easy there, ikiryou. You might fall right through the floor,”

Tobio recognizes the voice. It’s the one from before, still mysterious and hard to decipher. Finally able to move in real-time, Tobio whips unsteadily toward the source of the sound. But there’s no one standing in the doorway when he looks. Narrowing his eyes in confusion, he glances around the room from his low vantage point. He doesn’t get much of a view.

“Up here, ikiryou!” the voice purrs, and Tobio looks up to see—

A cat, perching on the doorjamb.

It’s scruffy and the color of pitch, with eyes like yellow moons. There’s intelligence behind those eyes, though, a sort of sharp human quality to them. Confused, Tobio opens his mouth to speak, but the cat raises a paw to stop him. “No, no, don’t. Don’t do that. Let me—”

The cat launches itself forward from the doorframe, turning a somersault in the air. Tobio is frozen in place as the cat’s limbs stretch and its body contorts, face flattening and growing as the wild black fur recedes. Before he touches the ground, the cat is no longer a cat, but rather a hunched man. He’s pale, and lanky, but he retains a feline sort of air to him in those sulfur-colored eyes and Chesirian smile. He’s also very shamelessly naked, and Tobio’s face flushes a bright crimson as he hastily averts his eyes. The cat (man?) snickers at Tobio’s immense embarrassment—more than enough to make up for the ashamedness the cat-man lacks.

“Oh-ho-ho, don’t be so bashful,” the cat-man purrs, straightening to a standing position. Tobio goes even darker red. “Get up; it’s weird when you’re so far below,”

Tobio scrambles up, still keeping his eyes firmly trained on the door behind the cat-man, mainly to avoid making eye-to-genital contact. “Um. Could you, please, er—put on some clothes?” Tobio asks, voice about an octave higher than normal. Hastily, he clears his throat to force it back to its usual pitch. The cat-man laughs again and plucks a hospital gown from the white plastic shelf on the wall, draping it over his bare form. Tobio chances a glance at his company, and lets out a sigh of relief when he sees the gown tied securely around his lithe form. He holds his hands open to Tobio, silently asking with a quirked eyebrow, _will this suffice?_

Tobio swallows hard. “What’s—”

“Going on?” the cat-man finishes, mouth still curled into a feline smirk. The muscles of Tobio’s jaw clench tightly in irritation, but he nods tersely. “That is a very interesting question. The short answer is that I don’t really know,”

“You don’t _know_? What do you _mean_ you don’t know?” Tobio snaps, eyes narrowing in frustration. “You were there, weren’t you? In the… the place… wherever that was?”

“The in-between,” the cat-man offers, helpfully. “Yes, I was,”

“Who _are_ you?”

“I have many names. My favorite is Kuroo Tetsurou,”

“Why are you here?”

“I _thought_ you were dead. I was going to eat your corpse,”

“ _What_ are you?”

“The locals call me the kasha,”

Tobio’s mouth goes dry, like he’s just had a ball of cotton stuffed in it. Kasha. He knows what that is… he’s heard of it, he thinks. His grandmother must have mentioned it once before… Oh god. He remembers now.

Tobio was young, young enough to believe in the stories his grandmother told him before his grandfather’s funeral. “Here, Tobio, put this on the coffin. It’ll keep the kasha from snatching away the corpse,”

Tobio had accepted the hair razor with wide, reverent eyes. His grandmother’s hands had engulfed his, wrinkly and warm and soft, setting the razor gently in the palm of his hand. “Kasha?” he asked, curious and confused by the strange custom.

“Kasha, my boy,” his grandmother confirmed, nodding her head, a warm smile shining on her face despite the seriousness of her voice. “Cat-demons. They’ll steal your ojii-chan’s body away during the funeral if we don’t ward against them,”

“Why would they do that?” Tobio had asked, not quite understanding the gravity his grandmother was placing on the situation. His grandmother shook her head and patted his hand.

“Don’t worry about it, Tobio. Just do as I say,”

And that was the last he had heard of it. He hasn’t heard the term or mentioned it again since that day, since he tucked the razor on top of his grandfather’s coffin. But now, this man standing before him, Kuroo Tetsurou… he claims to be a kasha? Claims to be the corpse-stealing demon from his grandmother’s stories? Tobio takes a step back, away from Kuroo, and the back of his knees bump into the edge of the hospital bed. Glancing down at the mattress, Tobio’s declaration of disbelief dies in his throat as he notices the bed’s occupant.

The room sways around him, and his body seems suddenly much too heavy for his legs to support. Lightheaded, he registers a pair of strong hands slotting underneath his armpits and lifting him up.

“Easy there—You’ll phase through to the basement at this rate,” Kuroo says, hoisting Tobio out of the floor, settling him in one of the stiff hospital chairs. Tobio blinks, dazed, and locks his eyes on the form lying in the hospital bed. It’s not possible, it can’t be—

But it _is._

It’s him, laying still and pale under sterile, papery sheets. It’s Tobio, but it _can’t_ be, because Tobio’s sitting in the chair, staring past the man claiming to be a kasha’s legs.

“It know, it’s a lot to take in, but you’re taking it better than the last guy—”

Kuroo’s words are drowned out when Tobio starts screaming at the top of his lungs.    

  


* * *

  


It takes a whole half an hour to calm Tobio down, and it attracts absolutely no attention from the hospital patrons. This rattles Tobio up even more, and Kuroo has to explain what he knows _very_ carefully to avoid any more outbursts.  


“You’re _probably_ an ikiryou. Your body is dying, so your spirit made a break for it. Human’s can’t see you, but you can see them,” Kuroo tells him, as straightforward as possible. Tobio has to forcefully tear his eyes away from the bed, blinking rapidly to get the image out of his mind. It’s no use; the picture is branded on the inside of his eyelids.

“If I’m an… ikiryou, or whatever, a spirit, then why am I still here? Shouldn’t I be in the afterlife, or something?” Tobio asks weakly, his head swimming with the influx of information and abrupt and forceful broadening of his mindset.

“You’re stuck. Your body’s still alive, so you’re still tied to it. You can’t move on ‘till it does,”

Tobio had never been overly religious or superstitious. He had never really believed in any of the spirits his father talked about sometimes, or participated in any of the traditions to ward against them. He is a logic-based person, and logic tells him that _this shouldn’t be happening_. So he makes a mental list of the evidence.

One: the in-between.

Two: Kuroo’s transformation.

Three: seeing himself from an outside perspective.

Four: nearly phasing through the floor.

It all seems fairly indisputable, but Tobio can’t wrap his mind around the idea of _ghosts_ and _demons_ and _afterlives_ , oh my. His brain sort of short-circuits on itself, making anything beyond simple thought processes near-impossible. Kuroo loses interest in him rather quickly, and leaves, shifting back into a cat to trot out the door with a meowed “Good luck, ikiryou!” over his shoulder. Tobio curses at him as he leaves via slinking straight through the door, leaving the hospital gown bunched up on the cool tile floor.                  

He’s alone again, invisible in a hospital with his physical form laying unconscious three feet away from him. The white noise of the hospital is a welcome change from the oppressive silence of the in-between, but it still doesn’t seem right. This whole situation doesn’t seem right. The sense of wrongness is overwhelming, as if he’s been plucked from his home and dumped in someone else’s. He feels out of place and uncomfortable, like he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be. Which, he supposes, he is.

Standing on shaky legs, Tobio shuffles to the hospital bedside. He wants to throw up, to turn tail and _run_ , but he forces himself to stay in place, locking his eyes on the form in the bed. He’s pale, and his face is partially obscured by a breathing tube. His translucent eyelids are closed, the blue webs of veins starkly visible. He looks… gaunt, his hair dull and hanging in his face. Tobio can feel the bile rising up in his throat again, and he turns away before he vomits ectoplasm or something all over his physical body. The thought itself sends a shudder down his spine.

Now that he doesn’t have shape-shifters and voids and physical forms occupying his thoughts and vision, Tobio can focus on his surroundings. They seem… dimmer, somehow, than they should be. The walls in the room look so much duller than hospital’s walls ought to, and the shadows in the corners have much more depth than any shadow Tobio can remember seeing. It seems like if he were to dip his hand into the shade, he would go right through…

Tobio jerks his hand back as the sudden chill that resides inside the shadows. It’s liquidy, like he’s dunking his hand in ice water. Recoiling from the shadows and stepping back into the brightness of the sterile room, he shakes his hand to rid the prickling aftereffects. Taking a deep breath, Tobio turns decisively and leaves the room, shakily pushing through the door into the hallway.

It’s a river of people, nurses and doctors and patients and families ebbing and flowing through the wide hallway like fish in eddies. But that’s not what brings the feeling of wrongness flying back at Tobio. What makes him feel so distraught are the _things_ that slip through the living currents. Some are hulking and dark, lumbering close to the walls, and some are small and lithe, sliding between legs and under doorways. They all have forms that vary from vaguely humanoid to downright animalistic, moving on anywhere from two legs to eight.

Something rubs against Tobio’s leg, its deep rumbling purr vibrating through his leg. Looking down, he resists the urge to kick the creature away in fear. It’s the color of the sky at dawn, a dusty grayish purple, and looks sort of like a very furry cat, if Tobio squints. When it turns its head to him, Tobio has to swallow down the scream that threatens to escape him. It has no hair of its face, and no discernable eyes or noses or mouths, only pale skin stretched tight over a smooth skull. Eyes wide, Tobio shakes his leg and gently tries to shoo the monstrosity away.

“She’s just being friendly, you know!” a voice says, from behind and above. Tobio whips around and comes face-to-face with a man’s chest, dressed comfortably in a gray sweatshirt and jeans. “Up here, friend,”

Tobio looks up to meet the newcomer’s gaze, but one look into those eyes sends him reeling backwards, as if shocked by a live wire. The tower of a man laughs, and his eyes thankfully close, giving Tobio enough time to reorient himself. When he manages to look at the man again, he’s bending down and scoops the hideous, faceless cat in his arms, letting it nuzzle against his cheek. Tobio fights down the sour bile rising up in his throat

“Yokai are so amazing, especially when they look like cats. There aren’t many cat spirits where I’m from, but here, there’s all sorts of different cat creatures,” the man says, scratching the yokai behind its ears.

“Is that what they’re called?” Tobio figures—since the people in the halls seem to ignore him—that the man is also some sort of spirit as well, and would know the names of the creatures.   

“But _you’re_ not a yokai,” the man says, ignoring Tobio’s question and taking a step closer, popping Tobio’s personal bubble of space. His happy face is gone now, eyes locked with Tobio’s, who shrinks away. Those eyes are deep as wells, swirling with leafy wisps of infinite wisdom, as if he’s collected every memory from every person he’s ever met and stored them in his eyes.  Tobio can feel his own memories being analyzed and invaded, but he can’t do anything but stand there, frozen, lost in those terrifyingly knowing eyes. “I know what you are. You should be wary, Kageyama Tobio. Watch yourself, lest you—”

“ _Lev!_ ”

The spell is broken, and Tobio can pull away as the man (Lev?) blinks in surprise. Lev jumps when he sees who it is, the yokai he had been petting falling, disgruntled, from his arms as he scrambles away down the hall, away from the voice’s owner. Tobio can only watch as the short man with his messy, straw-colored hair storms down the hall after the lanky Lev, the other creatures making way with hisses and grunts. Bewildered and a little overwhelmed, Tobio flattens himself to the wall to avoid being in the way, and watches the two figures disappear around a corner.

Tobio takes off as fast as he can in the opposite direction, stumbling over spirits and tripping down stairs. His feet make no sound as they slap on the ground, but even if they had, the only thing he can hear is Lev’s words, repeated over and over in his ears.

_"You should be wary, Kageyama Tobio,”_

It’s just the ramblings of some weird, other-world spirit guy, but it turns his blood to ice. It probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s probably not even real.

Tobio stops dead in his tracks, standing in the threshold of the hospital’s main entrance.

_It’s probably not even real._

The thought hadn’t even occurred to him before. He must be _dreaming_ , or having some hallucination. What was it called…lucid dreaming? Yes, that’s it. He’ll wake up eventually. He’ll wake up and everything will go back to normal, he’ll go back to being real and _human_ , back to the word where ikiryou and yokai and kasha don’t exist. Back to the world where—

“Look out!”

Tobio turns around just in time to get a face full of oily black feathers. The force bowling into him is all elbows and knees and surprised squawks, flailing around as it tries to disentangle itself from Tobio. Growling, Tobio shoves the thing off of him, scrambling backwards onto the hospital stoop on his hands and knees.

The _thing_ isn’t a thing, now that Tobio can get a good look at him. He’s small, lithe, and sitting amongst a flurry of downy gray fluff, presumably shed from his massive black wings. They extend along his arms, the long feathers splaying out and ending in claw-like hands. In contrast to his dark wings, his hair is bright orange, fluffed up like the down on the underside of his wings. Despite the obvious scrapes and bruises adorning his pale skin, the winged spirit is grinning widely.

“Did you see how fast I was going?” the spirit asks, shaking his head to free any fluff caught in his orange curls.

Tobio, now at his wit’s end with these spirits, spits out a cold, “Fast enough to knock me over,”

The winged spirit blinks, confused, and then leaps to his feet, wings fluttering akimbo at his sides. Speaking a mile a minute, he thrusts his hand out to Tobio, who still lays fallen on the ground. “Right! I’m so sorry, really—I was goin’ so fast that I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t see you ‘till the last minute, but _man_! What a ride!”

Tobio is taken briefly aback by the onslaught of words, and by how easily the winged spirit brushes off his blunder. Glaring at the hand offered to him, pale flesh melding with black feathers almost seamlessly, Tobio makes it a point to straighten himself without the help. “What _are_ you?” he asks, not caring at this point if he’s being rude. The spirit fluff himself up, all of his feathers standing on edge, as if he’s been waiting his whole life to be asked just that.

“I’m Hinata Shouyou, and I’m gonna be the best warrior of all the tengu!”       

  

**Author's Note:**

> index of monsters:  
> Kageyama: Ikiryou, a spirit that has detatched from a living body  
> Kuroo: Kasha, a yokai that steals the corpses of those who commited evil deeds in life  
> Lev: Dola, a russian spirit who embodies human fate  
> Yaku: the nameless embodiment of human fate worldwide  
> Hinata: Karasu-Tengu, a crow demon


End file.
